Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austria-born German citizen who served as a German soldier in World War I, and later joined the fascist political movement in Germany, known as the Nazi party ("National German Worker's Party"). Religious interests Hitler's religious affliations or lack thereof have been murky to historians for quite some time. What can be said is that he was neither a definitely orthodox (or fundementalist) Christian, nor was he a definite athiest. Hitler was a member of the Roman Catholic Church throughout his life and was never excommunicated. Despite this, the views of this low-life thug did not exactly align well with the orthodox Christian understanding of Jesus as the Son of God whose greatness was realized in his suffering and death by crucifixion (and subsequent resurrection), which his usage of Jesus to defend his Anti-Semitism in the Mein Kampf indicates: ""My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. As a Christian, I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice." (emphasis added.) Aside from the historical incoherence of the idea of Jesus being of the "Aryan" race assumed in this quote and of his actions in denouncing the Temple having their source in the type of Anti-Semitism he wished for the Nazis to follow, Hitler evinces an understanding of the one he regarded as "Lord" utterly at odds with the orthodox Christian doctrine of Jesus being regarded as "Lord" because of his suffering and resurrection beyond it. He mocked "Rabbi" Saul as the perverter of the Lord's original Aryan doctrine into a theological mix with Judaism, thus reversing all sound thinking on the relative openness of each to non-Jews to make Christianty fit his racist preconceptions. Furthermore, he seems to have believed that the Aryan race was created directly by God, whilst all other races had their source in the process of evolution, which had become diluted through racial mixing through the coniving of the Jews for their own advantage, and who have had to struggle to survive in the world ever since. He also did not seem to believe in the afterlife, but instead that the originally Aryan strain of humanity would exist for eternity if they were able to keep their racial purity and not have contact with the effects of evolution, as is indicated by his notion that he would in a sense live forever as the leader of the Aryan racialist force of history without a personal afterlife. On one's religious duty as his heterodox, un-traditional idea of a Christian to prevent this dreaded dilution, he had this to say: "The folkish-minded man, in particular, has the sacred duty, each in his own denomination, of making people stop just talking superficially of God's will, and actually fulfill God's will, and not let God's word be desecrated. For God's will gave men their form, their essence and their abilities. Anyone who destroys His work is declaring war on the Lord's creation, the divine will." Finally, he regarded Christianity as essential to the moral uplifting of the German nation, provided of course that it eventually fall in line with his thuggish untraditional interpertation of it. On these grounds, he made abortion an illegal crime punishable by death, with the exception of government-mandated abortions for those women whose babies would be handicapped in some way (including, of course, the "handicap" of having been racially-mixed which seemed to always be on his mind). For the same reason, he persecuted/executed homosexuals, atheists, Marxists of any stripe, and of course those races he saw as unfit, resulting in the ultimate extermination of Jews in his sinister concentration camps. However, his own words in the Mein Kampf indicate that he did not think his antisemitism was religiously motivated, saying that before he became aware of "sound" racialist science: "In the Jew I still only saw a man who was of a different religion, and therefore, on ground of human tolerance, I was against the idea that he should be attacked because he had a different faith." It would seem that he reinterperted orthodox Christianity in an ad hoc manner to make it fit what he saw as the truths of ideological racist "science", rather than his trying to make science fit a theoretical originally racist Christianity. In any case, Hitler used his crazy,mixed-up thuggish version of Christianity to try and justify Anti-semitism, and often managed to persuade traditional Christians in the process because of their long-held religiously-based Anti-Judaism (a percieved common enemy) and similar opposition to "athiestic Marxism".